Meizu M6 4GB - First Impressions

My first impressions are very good.

Well I got the chinese import version. Opening the package and first thought is "Wow!" is this thing small. It has very few buttons and a nice mirror finish on the back. My unit came pre-loaded with 2.003.2

The interface is designed well. There are some small and minor in the interface as far as navigation goes. Volume control isn't quite consistent between various functions for example. The setup with the video is understandable as you use the FF and RW buttons it would make it difficult to adjust the volume with the touch strip. However there is no easy way to go back to the main menu. I found holding down the power button then when it goes black and then pressing the menu button allowed me to return to the menu.

Music quality is outstanding. Especially for something as small as this. I was using the included earphones for my evaluation. I played some mp3s of varying bitrate. A few 128 and 160 mix. The audio was clear and clean with no obvious distortions even at higher audio levels. Some audio players tend to start distoring the audio if you go too high on the audio creating even static in rare cases. The Virtual 3D spatulization (sp?) was very effective and created convincing 3D audio.

Unfortunately I didn't create any of my own video for this run but I did play the included video (which is now deleted). The video quality was very smooth and no artifacts were noted in the video that was included. I played the file on my computer which revealed that the video was encoded with MP3 160Kbit audio and 20FPS video. Did not note the resolution.

The FM radio is kinda weak and the auto-tuning capability only picked up on 3 stations (I've got at least 7 within range). I was able to manually tune to other stations but a better way to move between them when manually tuning needs to be dealt with. This was kinda an afterthought even for me but the odd thing here is that my car stereo has an FM tuner in it and I rarely ever use the cd player part so I do listed to the radio alot. When I tuned to a local station manually I found the quality of the audio to be clean with minimal distortions. Nothing that was caused by the player itself though.


The settings are nice. In the special effects are you can set an audio limit so I set an upper limit of 20 after noting how loud it got. There are a bunch of other settings including customizing what shows up on the main menu.

USB connectivity is good. The player support MSC and MTP modes.

MSC mode will make your mini player a Mass Storage device where the computer will assign a drive letter. I found that in a command prompt I will get the message "The parameter is incorrect." a few times though when doing a directory listing from the root of the drive. This is not necessarily an issue but is slightly annoying since I sort of live at the command prompt. Files appeared to transfer quickly but I did no actual tests for speed.


MTP mode will make your mini player a Portable Device. This mode seems to work well but I did not try to transfer any files via this mode yet so I can't really comment as to how long it take to transfer files.


Other misc notes here. The player will automatically update the music library when you power on the unit and when you disconnect the device from usb. Unfortunately you are unable to actually play any music while updating as far as doing it from the interface but you can play files on your computer from the device. There is no charging adapter included so it needs to be charged via USB but it just has to be a powered USB plug. One trick would be to get a small USB hub that is powered and plug the Meizu into it when you need to charge it. The hub won't need to be connected to a computer -- just need to be powered. I have done this with other items that were like that as well. The added items like the pouch and the lint-free wipe is a nice touch. I am actually using the pouch and the wipe. The lack of an english manual (printed or as a pdf on the cd) was kinda surprising. I've imported other items before and they have had one then. This was especially surprising considering the that unit has English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese languages on it.

Get a USB > Mains adapter easier than hub , Great detail , Intresting.

Nice written review. The size surprised me as well. But now I like the quality and duration of playing music most. Slowly I get the leaving to put it in a bag during the use, and not permanently stroke or watch it at the work. :-)

Thanks for the input. I honestly don't do that many reviews but I try to get some detail across where I can. I guess I left out battery life but I have yet to actually test it so I didn't put it in the review. Battery life was one of the biggest selling points for me. 20-24 hours is quite alot.

Ok. I did a conversion test. I used iriverter 0.16 along with the meizu profile that was put together for it. Unfortunately I do not remember the post I got it from as I was gathering the items before I even got my meizu. I am going to give my kudo's to the individual who created the profile. If you created it then drop me a pm and point me to your post so that I can give you credit for it and link to the post from here. iriverter is one of many applications that use mencoder as a backend for the encoding.

File converted: Doom2_SS_NM_2956_HQ.avi
Original filesize: 262MB
Resulting filesize: 175MB
Original format: XVID 640x400 30fps -- MP3 VBR Avg 55Kbit
Resulting format: XVID 320x240 15fps -- MP3 CBR 256Kbit

I found some studdering that happened during playback but it was otherwise smooth on the meizu. I believe it was the file that caused the studdering and attribute it to an encoding error rather than an issue with the meizu. I was able to backtrack to the same spot and it would happen every time.

I'm going to adjust the profile to see if I get better results with 20fps since that is what the meizu can do now as well as lower the video bitrate and see what my results are.

EDIT:
Ok I did a recode and setup for 20fps, 384Kbit Video, and 160Kbit audio but the result was disastrous resulting in even worse studdering issues. It may be fps conversion issues. If they can get it up to 24fps then I can start mass-converting my anime.

I did another test with my anime. It is naruto episode 1 -- the fansub by animeone.

Original filesize: 178MB
Result filesize: 86MB
Original format: XVID 640x480 24fps -- MP3 VBR Avg 127Kbit
Result format: XVID 320x240 15fps -- MP3 CBR 160Kbit

There was some studdering in the beginning but nothing major. Sound keeps in sync well. The file shrank surprisingly well and probably would of done even better if I reduce the video bitrate down from 512Kbit to 384Kbit in iriverter. There is also some video tearing but nothing severe. This was also evident in the first encoding run I did.